Solar panels revive idle Massachusetts cranberry bogs

Two Massachusetts cranberry bogs that had stopped making financial sense to farm are growing berries again, and solar panels now stand over them. The Black Cat project in Plymouth and the Ring Road project in Kingston combine cranberry farming, community solar and battery storage. The developer, Distributed Energy Infrastructure (DEI), says the rent paid for the land has made it worthwhile to cultivate these long-idle bogs once more.

The engineering was harder than on an ordinary solar site. Cranberry bogs sit on soft, peaty soil and hold established vines that must survive construction, so heavy equipment cannot simply be driven in. The solar had to be fitted to the farm. DEI cofounder and executive vice president Prateek Tare has described panels raised 10 feet above the ground, with more than 18 feet of clear space between rows for farm machinery underneath, and with panel angles that let sunlight reach the bogs. Farmer Iain Ward helped work out those details and how construction could proceed without damaging the vines. Even the protective mats had to change: black ones absorbed too much heat, so crews used white ones instead.

That care took time. According to Tare, construction lasted around eight months, roughly twice as long as a comparable conventional solar project. "The DEI team was phenomenal at understanding and adapting solar construction so that energy production could coexist without damage to the perennial cropping system," Ward said.

What changes for the farmers is the arithmetic. The landowner receives solar land lease income, and Ward is paid to manage the bogs on top of what he earns from selling the berries. For a grower whose bog no longer covered its costs, that second income is what makes replanting a sensible decision, and it could let idle land return to production in other places with the same economics. The limits are as important as the promise. DEI's October announcement celebrates the first agrivoltaic cranberry harvests, dated by Tare's earlier account to fall 2025, but it gives no harvest volumes and no yield comparison with bogs grown without panels. Two sites, with the harvest counts still missing, are a first proof of concept, not yet a settled model.